The Resilient Energy Economies (REE) initiative, headquartered at Resources for the Future (RFF), is a research effort focused on the critically important topic of better understanding how fossil fuel-dependent communities—those that are largely reliant on coal, oil, or natural gas production—are experiencing, and impacted by, the transition to low-carbon energy systems. REE is led by an excellent group of early career scholars, drawn from different disciplines, institutions, and research backgrounds. The current team of co-organizers includes Daniel Raimi, Director of the Equity in the Energy Transition Initiative at RFF; Noah Kaufman, Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University; Julia Haggerty, Associate Professor of Resource Geography at Montana State University; and Emily Grubert, Associate Professor of Sustainable Energy Policy at the University of Notre Dame. This grant supports REE as it continues and expands its research agenda. REE will hold an open Request for Proposals (RFP) to support a series of place-based research projects that examine the economic and social dimensions associated with how fossil fuel-dependent communities are experiencing energy transitions, allocating a total of $450,000 across 6-11 small research projects. Research topics to be emphasized in the open RFP include issues like how employment opportunities are changing in fossil fuel communities, examining the distributional impacts on households with different demographic features, evaluating the effects of state-level policies, and exploring the relationship between state and federal policy impacts. Grant funds will also support the organization of two researcher convenings per year as well the expansion of REE’s project management capacity by hiring a new program manager.

All known forms of life rely on DNA as the carrier of genetic information and on proteins as the primary functional agents. The present-day molecular systems that implement DNA replication and protein synthesis are highly-evolved, and it’s reasoned that life began by leveraging much simpler systems. In the late 1960s scientists began to hypothesize that a molecule that could serve both as a carrier of information and as a catalyst that facilitates replication was critical to the emergence of life. That molecule was -and is- thought to be a version of RNA called a polymerase ribozyme, and the aforementioned hypothesis has come to be known as the RNA World Hypothesis. This polymerase ribozyme would possess the unique ability to copy RNA sequences, including its own, and thereby sustain a self-replicating, evolving system. While biology has revealed naturally occurring ribozymes (RNA molecules with the enzyme-like ability to catalyze chemical reactions), none are known to possess the ability to replicate RNA. Funds from this grant support work by Gerald Joyce, President and CEO of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, to use directed evolution -a method that mimics natural selection- to develop a ribozyme that catalyzes its own replication and undergoes Darwinian evolution.  Directed evolution is a laboratory technique that uses cycles of mutation, selection, and amplification to evolve molecules with targeted functions. Joyce and his research team have made impressive strides using directed evolution to incrementally enhance the catalytic ability, speed, accuracy, and generality of polymerase ribozymes. Their current ribozymes can synthesize ancestral (smaller) versions of themselves and drive exponential amplification (increase the number of selected molecules), but they are not yet capable of full self-replication. A crucial requirement for evolution is, of course, the ability to accurately propagate genetically encoded information across generations. If the replication process introduces too many errors, information important to the successful propagation of an organism is lost. Joyce seeks to increase the fidelity of polymerase ribozymes to facilitate the faithful replication of longer and more information-rich RNA sequences; ultimately achieving the synthesis of an entire polymerase ribozyme itself. If successful, the  project will realize an artificial lifeform that serves as a platform for studying emergent complexity, adaptive evolution under environmental pressure, and the origins of more sophisticated genetic and metabolic networks from simpler molecular systems.

The vast majority of planets are too distant to visit, so remote observation and subsequent analysis are essential to the search for extrasolar life. Telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope are providing an important new opportunity to directly observe exoplanet atmospheres for signs of life, but we currently lack a quantitative framework for understanding what observations of a planet’s atmosphere provide compelling evidence for life on the underlying planet. Developing a framework that allows one to infer whether or not a planet is inhabited is a two-step process: understand atmospheres in the absence of life (abiotic baselines), and understand how life modifies an atmosphere (atmospheric biosignatures).  This grant renews support for a team of modelers and experimentalists -the AEThER collaboration (Atmospheric Empirical, Theoretical, and Experimental Research)- to tackle the former question.AEThER seeks to develop a framework to quantify the abiotic atmospheric baseline for rocky planets commonly found in our galaxy. Developing such a framework will provide a flexible tool for quantifying how different conditions driving the formation and evolution of a planet lead to different abiotic atmospheric baselines.  Funded activities under this grant include a series of experiments to broaden our understanding of how readily so-called “volatile” elements and compounds—which include nitrogen gas, oxygen gas, hydrogen gas, water, ammonia, and carbon and sulfur dioxide—dissolve into magmas and liquid metals at the high temperatures and pressures common during planetary formation and evolution. The solubility of these molecules plays a key role in determining the viscosity and possible solidification of a planet’s mantle, with significant implications for heat transfer throughout the planet and atmosphere, as well as gas release back to the atmosphere, and thus habitability. In addition and informed by this experimental work, AEThER will continue to develop their theoretical models, including modeling the impacts of atmospheric hazes (suspended small particles) on planetary evolution, which, under different conditions, can either raise or lower planetary temperatures appreciably. When completed, the funded grant work will represent a notable advance in our understanding of planetary processes, and serve as an important complement to research aimed at identifying atmospheric biosignatures.